Tags

getting things done requires a pipeline of projects

Even though I am a manager and practicing programmer/wannabe sysadmin, having a productive day like today requires proactively building and maintaining a pipeline of projects and network of experts much like a salesperson maintains a pipeline of deals and network of decision makers.

Today I emailed people who I have not spoken to in months or years, followed up on contracts, advised a colleague at work on how to solve some relationship issues on their project, attended a weekly project review call, spent a lot of time thinking about analytics and metrics, packaged and uploaded CouchDB 1.0 to Ubuntu, committed fixes to Debian SVN for CouchDB package, wrote/code reviewed/revised/deployed/tested a fix in production for ubuntuone.com error pages based on a mailing list discussion this morning, did a tech analysis/recommendation of how to implement a new feature, got new tires, walked outside and admired the large and inspiring moon with my daughter, reproduced a frustrating issue that has been stopping us from upgrading django on a project at work and blogged about it asking for help, ordered a new sticker for my laptop, consulted on a video installation at the church where I volunteer, fended off a Panopticon sales rep and got a useful recommendation in return, and deleted lots of emails and unread blog entries. I'm writing all this down because sometimes I don't feel like I get enough done in a day, and writing it down gives me hope that things are actually getting done. None of this would have gotten accomplished today without the zillion invisible bits of work that went into that pipeline in the last 6 months.